Author Topic: Video card Suggerstions (Read 532 times)

SirLoin · « **on:** December 01, 2006, 12:41:40 PM »

I have a P4 1ghz,1 gig ram and an ATI 9800 Pro i'm lookin to upgrade.

I can't afford the latest cards but what would be a good upgrade in the $150-200 range?

Krusty · « **Reply #1 on:** December 01, 2006, 04:07:51 PM »

Hell man, you're bottlenecked as-is by your CPU. You won't get any better performance with a faster card, because your 1GHz CPU is keeping you from using it. I say keep the 9800 (for now) and use the $150 and get a new CPU. Heck, you can get a 3GHz chip for $150 or so these days. *THEN* you'd see a noticable boost.

That way you can get a better card down the line and actually benefit from it.

Hope this helps.

Skuzzy · « **Reply #2 on:** December 01, 2006, 04:51:24 PM »

Krusty is a little over zealous, but he is on the right track. Your 9800 is not running to its fullest potential due to the CPU you have. A better video card would suffer the same fate, I am afraid.

You might get a little bit better performance, but not much. Certainly not enough to justify the expenditure.

Also note, your motherboard is AGP based. AGP is going away, so any investment in a video card could be a dead end investment.

SirLoin · « **Reply #3 on:** December 01, 2006, 06:40:57 PM »

oops..I meant to say i have a P4 3ghz cpu.

SNO · « **Reply #4 on:** December 01, 2006, 08:41:48 PM »

My sig has my specs and I went from a 9800 pro 128meg card to a x850 pro and saw little performance improvements. I thought I would see a much larger improvement and was a little disappointed, doesn't matter much as I needed another card anyways for sons comp so nothing wasted.

Skuzzy · « **Reply #5 on:** December 01, 2006, 08:45:22 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by SirLoin
oops..I meant to say i have a P4 3ghz cpu.

That's a little bit more like it. Hmmm, maybe a NVidia 6600 or 6800 card.

Krusty · « **Reply #6 on:** December 01, 2006, 11:59:28 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Skuzzy
Krusty is a little over zealous

Okay, okay, guilty as charged. I really wanted to drive the point home, and went overboard, sorry :*(

EDIT: I wouldn't spend more than $100 for a card. Skuzzy's quite right in that AGP is going away. Less and less folks are building them and dozens and dozens of them are popping up in PCIe, for any given model number.

If you really have to, I'd get a mid-grade card. The 9800 is pretty old. Skuzzy's mentioned the Ge 6 series, but another good medium-grade card is the X1600 Pro. It's only about $100 for an AGP card, it has a newer CPU but slower VRAM and other stuff. So it's a good compromise for budget-minded folks. It was one of my considerations, but I splurged and went a little higher-end than that in the end (I'm PCIe)

airspro · « **Reply #7 on:** December 02, 2006, 05:40:36 AM »

What do u think of this card ?

I went from a 5700LE to a 6600 card and seen some improvements but after reading alot more

I should have at least gotten the GT version .

Some are saying for 3.0's to max out get 6800 series , but they are quite loud I guess , the fans .

A 7600GS is not that much more and reviews say that it's a nice upgrade from what I had but donno about the power useage . I believe I have a 460 watt ps atm .

AH for me now runs pretty good , been thinking on just staying with the status qoe for now and in about 8 months making a new updated one with the conroe chip .

Most times i get maxed 75 fps flying 1024 , 768 . Slows down some with the trees down low , donno how low but you can sure see it happening when you got a con in view . Not so good .

Anyway just some thoughts here , I am trying to learn more as it's hard to stay current for me .

Looking for ideas myself maybe .

eagl · « **Reply #8 on:** December 02, 2006, 05:58:24 AM »

sirloin,

A 6800 series card would work fine. I would suggest the AGP 7800 GS since it was on sale at newegg for $200ish, but I tried one and it just wouldn't work. I dunno what the problem was since my system is otherwise ok and I have a 430W power supply, but it just wouldn't work right so I returned it and went back to my 6800GT. With the 6800GT and dual core A64 4400, I can run 1280x1024 resolution, 4x FSAA, and "high quality" texture settings and almost never drop below 30 fps. In flight, I'm usually over 60 fps.

I wouldn't get the 6600 (as airspro found out), because the price diff from a 6600 to 6800 isn't huge but the 6800 GT (or GS now?) is a lot faster than the 6600. They might have an AGP 7600 that would be nice because you'd be able to use transparancy FSAA which makes fences and trees in some games look a lot nicer. The thing is that with a 6800 or higher, you'll be able to peg framerates above 60 so you can start increasing image quality settings until your framerates settle down wherever you decide is the best tradeoff.

A 7600 with 512 meg video memory would be really cool because then you could run the 1024 AH textures with really high FSAA settings, probably including transparancy supersampling. That would look sweet.

That said, a 6800GT (or GS?) would work just fine and save you some bucks towards your next big system upgrade.

airspro · « **Reply #9 on:** December 02, 2006, 12:58:08 PM »

eagl

Thanks for the nice reply , always enjoy this Hardware forum . I seem to always learn something everyday here .

You also Krusy and all .

Krusty · « **Reply #10 on:** December 02, 2006, 05:11:29 PM »

Forget 7000 series GeForces in AGP. For one, there's only a handful, and the one card that shouldn't cost an arm and a leg, *does* cost an arm and a leg, because it's the only one available in AGP (7600GT). The 7800GS AGP card is crippled compared to the same card in PCIe. It's not worth the extra money to get anything that fast in AGP. They cut back the number of pipelines, they cut back on half the features, just because it's AGP.

Stay around $100 if you're sticking with AGP. Any more than that, and consider moving to PCIe. That involves a motherboard change.

EDIT: Airspro, the X800GTO is one of the better ATI cards. I've only heard good things about it. However the X1600 is pretty good as well, and $30 less. Side by side, the X800 outperforms the X1600, but not by too much. It's a matter of how much you're willing to pay on a card that has to last you many years, and whether you're going to switch to PCIe before the operational life of that card is over.

SirLoin · « **Reply #11 on:** December 03, 2006, 05:32:05 PM »

Well i went out and bought the X1600Pro and it don't work..Plugged it in the slot..connected the flimsy 4 prong connector(vs the old much larger & robust connector) and couldn't even get the monitor to lite.

i got a good deal cause it was returned by a previous customer..hmmm..something tells me the power connector is nfg or card is defective.

Back to the 9800pro for now...grr!

Krusty · « **Reply #12 on:** December 03, 2006, 06:07:46 PM »

What kind of a power supply do you have?

Did you use a molex connector that had nothing else on the same wires (no HD, CD-ROM, etc)? Was it seated properly (stupid question, but folks on this forum have run into that problem before!) and was the monitor properly hooked up.

Also go into BIOS and see if you have a way to set primary display (AGP/PCIe/Onboard/whatever).

SirLoin · « **Reply #13 on:** December 05, 2006, 06:25:49 PM »

Well i returned the defect X1600 and bought a G-Force 7600GC OC.

I bumped up default settings in nvida control panel..maxed out AH2(Hi-Res,Detail and set at 1600x1200)

Took of from a very smoking & capped base and was gettin 30fps..!!

Thnx for all the inputs..!

My power supply is 350w dc Krusty.u think i need upgrade ?

Krusty · « **Reply #14 on:** December 06, 2006, 01:41:32 AM »

For a 7600 no. 7600s can run off the power supplied by the slot (no additional plugs). But 7800 and higher need the plugs, and would benefit from 400+ Watts.